C-55 Juan de la Barrera

You go down the line, because the current here does not negotiate. The hull comes up at around twenty metres and runs to twenty-five on the sand, and the first thing you notice is that it is not one shape any more. Wilma took it apart in 2005, and what is left is sections with daylight between them and openings that were never designed.

That damage is what makes it worth diving. A sealed hull is a silhouette; a broken one is a structure you can read. Barracuda hang in the current above the wreckage, green morays hold in the torn sections, and grunts and snappers stack in whatever shelter the plating still makes. Between December and March, spotted eagle rays move through, which is when most people book it.

Bottom time is short at this depth with this current. Half an hour is a full dive here.

She was launched in San Francisco in 1943 as USS Ransom, hull number AM-283, one of a class of small minesweepers built in a hurry for a war that needed them. She reached the Pacific in late 1944 and went to Okinawa with the invasion fleet in March 1945.

On 6 April 1945, in the middle of a mass kamikaze attack on the picket line, "Ransom shot down three suicide aircraft while rescuing 52 survivors of USS Rodman (DMS-21) and USS Emmons (DMS-22)" 1. The Emmons was hit so badly she had to be scuttled afterwards. Ransom was damaged herself a fortnight later by a bomb from a Japanese aircraft and kept working the line into June. She ended the war sweeping mines at Nagasaki, clearing 73 in a month, and was awarded three battle stars.

Mexico bought her in 1962. She served more than thirty years under a Mexican flag, and in 1994 was renamed ARM Teniente Juan de la Barrera, after a nineteen-year-old cadet killed defending Chapultepec Castle in 1847. In 2000 she was stripped and sunk deliberately off Cancún to make reef 2.

Her sister the C-58 lies four kilometres away and had the opposite career: commissioned two weeks after the war ended, she never reached a war zone at all.

This is an Advanced dive and operators treat it as one 3. Twenty-five metres, real current, and a hull in pieces. Both descent and ascent are made on the line, which is not a formality here.

If penetration is offered, understand what it is. The openings are hurricane damage rather than designed access, nobody has published a structural assessment since 2005, and the two available accounts of the damage do not even agree on whether she is in two pieces or four. Entering is overhead diving and wants the training that implies.

It is almost always sold with the C-58 as a single two-wreck morning, so plan the day around both rather than around this one.